TN Editor,

I read your paper regularly. I read almost every article about Carbon County School District Board meetings.

For years, it seems a habit in the spring school budget season, your reporters persistently write with a BIAS toward advocating for raising taxes and placing more financial burden on them. This article “LASD gap expected to get worse” reflects that same misinformation.

The reporters need to start asking pertinent questions; not only report skewed presentations with misinformation provided from paid administrators.

What public school administrators present every year is an orchestrated Power Point of their preferred talking points to promote a bad financial scenario and tax increase. Too many are indoctrinated in their roles to raise taxes regularly.

Unfortunately, practically 80-90% of our 4,500 PA School Board members are unprepared and uninformed in how to analyze school budgets. This is a large part of why public schools find it easy to spend so much ...

Regardless of what superintendents and admins claim, all spending is discretionary — contracts (before signed execution), salaries, Athletics, ancillary services, etc. — ALL spending is discretionary at some point in the decision-making process. They do have more control than they say.

Public school fund balances can only be realized by overtaxing on the local level for higher budgeted expenditures which we get taxed for annually and revenues end up unspent leaving a “fund balance.” No state subsidies are ever returned to the Commonwealth because they only subsidize their objective limits and not a penny more. Federal funds are minimal amounts and only cover 2% of the annual budgets.

The best possible solution is to convert every public-school budget construction to a zero (O) balance budget where you spend only what you incur expenses vs banking OPM and hoping not to spend what they already collected leaving their fund balances grow at taxpayer expense. Current school budgeting process is archaic and quite flawed.

The school districts’ taxpayers of Carbon County and of PA need to read this and understand!

Gerard E. Grega Sr.

Weatherly School Board member